Mountaineer Tycoons: Edmund Hillary & Tenzing Norgay

Many experienced mountaineers all over the world who have tried to reach the summit Everest had failed and in the journey many lost their lives. George Leigh Mallory, in 1924 made his attempt and ever since vanished only to be found dead in the ice, 2000 feet below the summit, after 75 years.

The Royal Geographical Society-Alpine club, led by Colonel Henry Cecil John Hunt along with a dozen climbers, 35 Sherpa guides and 350 people carrying 18 tones of food and equipments, only mission was to conquer Mount Everest. First team to attempt was Tom Bourdillion and Dr. Charles Evans. They could only reach up to 28,720 of 29,035 feet and gave up due to exhaustion, storm and oxygen tank failures.

The Second team was sent, One 33 year old of New Zealand and the other 39 year old of Nepal. They reached till 27,900 feet and halted for the night in a tent. The temperature was 30 degree below zero. They spent the night fighting the cold only to continue their journey the next day.

The sun as risen, both of them started for accomplishing their mission. They took with them oxygen tanks which would last for roughly seven hours and other tanks left out by their previous team. The summit was 5.5 vertical miles above sea level, where Jets fly today, 100 miles-an-hour cold wind which hits like a knife and the air so thin, where the human brain and lungs do not function properly. In spite of all this obstacles, the Mount Everest was finally conquered.

The day was May 29, 1953. And the Mount Everest first conquerors were Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal. Queen Elizabeth-II honored Edmund as Knight Commander of the order of the British Empire and Tenzing Norgay with George Medal of Britain. Then came the question put forth by public and media, “who was the first to reach the Mt. Everest, was it Edmund or Norgay”. Colonel Henry John Hunt of Royal Geographical Society cleared the controversy by declaring “they reached it together, as a team”.

Edmund served as New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India, Bangladesh and Nepal from 1985-1988. Norgay died in the year 1986. Edmund through his foundation called Sir Edmund Hillary Himalayan trust built many schools, hospitals and helped the people in the villages of Nepal. Edmund is the first person to stand on both poles and on Everest. Sir Edmund Hillary died on January 11, 2008.

Then after the first conquerors of Mt. Everest till now, 3000 people including Edmund’s son Peter and Norgay’s son Jamling have reached the summit. On a single day in 2003, 118 people climbed and reached Mount Everest.

But only Pioneers will remain in the pages of history and in the hearts of people. Take the road less travelled is Success, Taking the path never travelled and setting tracks is History.

Source: The Hindu, January 12, 2008 and Internet.

History: A Bench Mark for Success CHARLES CHAPLIN

Laughter is like a medicine. One who makes others laugh is considered to be a doctor. One who made the world laugh and occupied a special place in the pages of History is Charlie Chaplin.

The full name of Charlie Chaplin is Charlie Spencer Chaplin. He was born on April 16 1889, in England. His parents were stage performers. His childhood was clouded with sadness. His father and mother got divorced. His father died because of his addiction to the alcohol. His mother lost her singing voice, which pushed Charlie on to stage at the age of five. His mother health was suffered seriously and was admitted in hospital. His brother name was Sidney Chaplin, who was at sea. These situations forced Charlie to lead his childhood alone.

At the age of sixteen, for his wonderful performance in Sherlock Holmes’s play, his name was featured in news papers. At the age of twenty four, he joined Keystone pictures and his first comedy appearance was made in “Making a Living”. With in a year, he directed his first comedy “Twenty minutes of love”. His marriage life was not good. His fourth marriage with Oona was a happy one and lasted forever. His first full length movie was “The Kid” in which he captured his childhood life. The movie which brought him “The world’s funniest man” fame was “The Gold Rush”. He didn’t leave his British Citizenship and American people thought that he was supporting communism. For these two reasons, Americans wanted him to be out of their country. After the grand success of the movie “The Limelight”, Charlie along with his family went to Britain for a vacation. Waiting for this moment, American Government posed a rule restricting his entry again to their country. And his name was removed from Los-Angeles “Walk of Fame” celebrity list. Since he was not allowed to enter into America, he along with his family moved to Switzerland. There he continued making his movies. His Autobiography is considered to be one of the finest literatures.

After twenty years, considering his spectacular contribution to the field of cinema, America welcomed him back and the academy awarded him with “The Life Time Achievement” award. Queen Elizabeth awarded Charlie Chaplin with “Sir” title. His name was again included in “Walk of Fame” celebrity list. Even though his childhood was filled with sorrows and his life took him through many difficult times, with laughter as his strength he made his life a great success and a memorable one.If you too have any strength with strong determination to succeed in life, you too can find some place in the pages of History.

ATTRITION: THE PRESENT SCENARIO

Indian economy is booming. Many Multinational companies are making their presence stronger because of the growth opportunities and available market in India. Low cost knowledge workers constitute our country to be one of the best preferred destinations for Multinational companies. With lots of MNC’s around, job opportunities are plenty, at the same time individuals leaving one company and shifting to another company are increasing. In simple, an employee leaving the organization is known as ATTRITION. Literarily it means “the reduction in staff and employees in a company through normal means such as retirement and resignation”.
Fresh graduates and post graduates are attracted towards huge salaries, infrastructure of international level and new working environment. Soon to realize, these factors are necessary but not important. What really important is a job which challenges them, where there is a scope for learning new skills and foremost the contribution that he or she makes to the growth of the company. Experienced individual leaves the company because of the poor reward, recognition system and role stagnation.
SECTOR Attrition %

Sales
36%

Banking and Finance
25%

Outsourcing
23%

Manufacturing
11%

Hewitt Associates, the Worlds foremost provider of human resources consulting and outsourcing firm have conducted a survey titled “Attrition and retention study Asia Pacific” in 2006. The main objective of the survey was to know the reasons “why employees leave the organization” and “what are the strategies followed widely to retain them”.

And the results are quite interesting; employees leave the organization because of:

Inequity of compensation
Limited growth opportunities
Role stagnation

And the study also found out that the top three strategies followed by many organizations in retaining the employees are:

Pay above market
Provide opportunities to learn new skills
Provide favourable work life balance

The survey was conducted in 170 foreign owned, locally owned and joint venture companies from China, Hongkong, India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand covering over 2,30,000 employees..

With rupee becoming stronger, the IT & BPO companies in India are forced to tighten the salary hikes. Now the situation is “You would get more only if you work more and perform better”. Salary cost is the biggest component of cost, accounting for 45% of IT Companies costs and 40% of BPO costs. So, now it has become a biggest challenge for HR professionals to retain the employees in the current trend. Finally, there is a desperate need for HR managers to identify the reasons for attrition before the situation reaching its climax, which is employees leaving the organization.


Source: http://www.hewitt.com/, http://www.indiabpo.com/ , http://www.answer.com/, HRD Newsletter (January, May, June, July 2007), Times of India (July 23, 2007). Image source: dqindia.ciol.com/2004/images/attrition_15april2k4.jpg

The English Pronounciation

I had the opportunity of attending a workshop on Pronunciation skills and Accent neutralization. The workshop was conducted by Centre for English Language Training, Department of English, University College of Engineering, Osmania University campus, Hyderabad. The workshop was of six hours which was divided in to two sessions. The morning session was Pronunciation skills and the afternoon session was Accent neutralization. The class started with Ms. D. Grace Sunitha, explaining some of the words which were wrongly pronounced. We usually find some symbols beside every word in the dictionary, which shows how a word should be correctly pronounced often. These symbols and the way it sounds were interactively practiced in the workshop. There are 44 sounds in English. Out of which 24 are consonant sounds and the rest 20 are vowel sounds. The workshop provided me a chance to better understand the British and American accents.

Usually in British English (which is commonly spoken in India) mostly the stress on the letter “R” is missed or not pronounced clearly and where as in American English quite oppositely the letter “R” is stressed and pronounced clearly. And we were taught many exceptions in English language pronunciation. Here I would like to mention some of the words, like “CRICKET”, the actual pronunciation is “CRICKIT” and the word Menu which should be pronounced like “Menyu” (please don’t consider the spelling, it is just for pronunciation). And in the dictionary you can find the word Menu transcribed as /menju:/ for pronunciation.

In the end of the first session, Ms. Grace has suggested to purchase Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary and practice the pronunciation part. In the second session, Mr. P. Shreehari, for a short while imitated how a native speaker of different languages (Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam etc) would have spoken English language. I could very easily notice the influence of mother tongue of various languages on English. Humorous, but it is a fact. Mr. Shreehari took us through the ways of neutralizing the mother tongue influence by proper pronunciation of English language. Some of the books and dictionaries suggested by Mr. Shreehari are 1.Longman Dictionary of contemporary English (with CD) which has both the British and American way of pronunciations, 2. English Pronunciation in U.S by Mark Hancock (with CD), 3.A handbook for English Language Laboratory by Suresh kumar and Shreehari, 4.Murphy’s English grammar by Raymond Murphy.

The courses offered by CELT-Osmania are 1.Advanced course in Communication skills and personality development, 2.Interactive course in English grammar and Vocabulary, 3.Workshop on Pronunciation skills and accent neutralization, 4.Workshop on English grammar. The center also offers tailor made courses for corporate sector and Individual groups. Fresh batches commences every month, usually in the second week. The one day workshop fee is Rs.300 and Rs.2500 for regular courses.
English language Work shops and courses show us the door, the key to speak or write good and correct English is in our hands. I hope this piece of writing/ information would prove to be a useful one for my friends and individuals who are interested in sharpening their other tongue language (English).

Image source: http://englishinguiabasico.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/conversation1.jpg